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Prayers

Comfort of the sad

This prayer comes from the Good Friday service of the Latin West, before East and West parted. It calls God the Comfort of the sad and the Strength of all who struggle.

Picture: Giovanni Girolamo Savoldo, Elijah Fed by the Raven, about 1510

The words of the prayer

Plain English

Almighty, everlasting God,the Comfort of the sad,the Strength of all who struggle:let the prayers of everyone who cries outfrom any trouble at all come before You,so that all of them may rejoicethat Your mercy stood by them in their need.

Through our Lord Jesus Christ. Amen.

Traditional wording, 1857

Almighty and everlasting God, the Comfort of the sad, the Strength of sufferers,let the prayers of those that cry out of any tribulation come unto Thee;that all may rejoice to find that Thy mercy is present with them in their afflictions;through Christ our Lord.

Plain English by Wiser Walk, from the Latin, with William Bright’s 1857 translation beside it. How the wording is made. Traditional wording: William Bright, Ancient Collects and Other Prayers, 1857.

Bright’s “sufferers” stands for a Latin word for those who toil or are hard pressed, so the plain wording says “all who struggle”.

When it is said

In the Latin West it was said once a year, on Good Friday, among the solemn prayers that follow the reading of the Passion.

It is short enough to say in any trouble, for yourself or for someone you love.

Where it comes from

No author known

Where it comes from

No author is named. The prayer is found in the Gelasian Sacramentary, a Latin book of the priest’s prayers for the Mass. The manuscript was most probably written in the 600s or early 700s for a church in the lands of the Franks. It is kept today in the Vatican Library.

H. A. Wilson, The Gelasian Sacramentary (1894), introduction and Book I, ch. 41

What the people prayed for first

The priest said solemn prayers on Good Friday, after the Passion was read. Before this one he asked the people to pray that God would take away disease and famine, open prisons, break chains, bring travellers home, give health to the sick and a safe harbour to those at sea. The deacon called them to kneel and then to stand, and the priest gathered their prayers into this one.

H. A. Wilson, The Gelasian Sacramentary (1894), pp. 75 to 77

Its English

William Bright put it into English in Ancient Collects in 1857, under the heading “For the Afflicted”. A century later J. Manning Potts printed the same words in Prayers of the Early Church as a prayer “For the Sorrowing”.

William Bright, Ancient Collects and Other Prayers (1857), p. 105; J. Manning Potts, Prayers of the Early Church (1953)

The Scripture in it

Hear my prayer, O LORD; let my cry for help come before You.

Psalm 102:1 Echoed “Let my cry for help come before You”: the psalm’s own plea that a prayer reach God.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of compassion and the God of all comfort, Who comforts us in all our troubles, so that we can comfort those in any trouble with the comfort we ourselves have received from God.

2 Corinthians 1:3-4 Echoed Paul’s God of all comfort, Who comforts us in all our troubles.

Bible text: Berean Standard Bible, public domain.

In Latin

Omnipotens sempiterne Deus,

moestorum consolatio, laborantium fortitudo,

perveniant ad te preces de quacumque tribulatione clamantium,

ut omnes sibi in necessitatibus suis misericordiam tuam gaudeant adfuisse.

Per Dominum.

From H. A. Wilson, The Gelasian Sacramentary (1894), the solemn prayers of Good Friday.

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Berean Standard Bible